Submitted by Kevin, who says:

I combined two cool developments I’ve seen in transit maps on the internet, the isometric map from Stuttgart (October 2011, 5 stars) and GIFs of the evolution of a system.

I lived in Dallas for school and again as a professional and while the network could be better, I always enjoyed riding the DART. And actually the system really lent itself to the map principles that seemed to work for so well for Stuttgart.

It is diagrammatic and might be difficult to show in this isometric format as the plans for a second alignment through downtown are finalized. But I look forward to the challenge, it will be great to get 5 minute headways on every line. It is currently a huge bottleneck to run every line through the same street-level trackage.

Transit Maps says:

This is pretty neat, Kevin! The isometric viewpoint looks good, although it may be a little disorienting at first and take a couple of loops of the GIF for people to work out how it relates to the real-world layout of the DART network.

One improvement I can think of is to make time run linearly in even increments, instead of “skipping ahead” to the next construction activity. If nothing changed between 2002 and 2009, I think that’s just as important to know as when the new sections were opened. As it stands, the GIF makes it look like there’s near-constant expansion from 1996 all the way to 2014… and that’s not really the case at all.